Forums » News and Announcements
The robots are here. And they are making you fries.
-
The robots are here. And they are making you fries.
At the end of July, a Jack in the Box in Chula Vista, Calif., got a new employee. He stood there for a couple of weeks while other workers swirled around him, jockeying between flattop and fryer, filling up paper sleeves with the tacos that the fast-food brand sells every year by the hundred million.To get more news about Robotics as a Service, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.
And then, having learned the ropes, he began to work, focusing exclusively on the fry station, dropping baskets of seasoned curly fries and stuffed jalapeños into vats of oil, eagle-eyeing when they were perfectly golden. He doesn’t take breaks, never shirks when the boss isn’t looking, won’t call out sick or lean heavy on the company health insurance. But that doesn’t mean he comes cheap. Flippy the Robot cost $50 million to develop, and cost Jack in the Box about $5,000 for installation and $3,500 per month for rental.
Restaurants have toyed with robotics for years, cropping up as early as 1983 when Two Panda Deli in Pasadena used robots to schlep Chinese food from the kitchen to customers. There have been sushi-rolling robots and coffee-brewing robots and tiny drone “iTray” waiters: Often they are consumer-facing, a form of customer entertainment and “value added” to set a brand apart.
But now — with restaurants facing a protracted labor shortage and robotic technology becoming both better and cheaper — restaurant brands are doing new math. How long before an initial technology investment pays off? How long will it take to train human employees to work alongside robot co-workers? And, ultimately, how many restaurant jobs will be permanently commandeered by robots?
The way Miso Robotics chief executive Mike Bell tells it, Flippy was initially a solution in search of a problem. The company has been around six years, five entirely in research and development, trying to bring a product to market. The robotics lab’s sprawling warehouse in Pasadena is packed with whizzing robot pieces and 3D printers hustling to keep up with the demands of 120 engineers and programmers. Their initial question: In a nation that consumes nearly 50 billion burgers each year, why not develop a robot that can flip them with precision at every fast-food restaurant?
They took the idea to White Castle. The burger brand’s executives said the idea sounded nice, but they had a more pressing need: Got anything for the fryer?
The fryer station is hot and it’s dangerous. It’s frequently where workplace accidents occur. It’s also where the drive-through gets jammed up at night with people waiting on their loaded fries and chicken rings.
So Miso let Flippy keep his jaunty name but re-engineered him to start dipping fries. White Castle bought in, installing Flippy in a Merrillville, Ind., location and then several others around the country, with the aim of having 100 over the next few years. Jack in the Box execs zipped up to Pasadena for a demo.
Miso Robotics kept going, developing a coffee forecaster-maker-pourer for Panera. It began work on Sippy, a drink fulfillment robot that pours, seals and labels beverage orders — which will also be employed later this year at Jack in the Box — as well as Chippy, which will soon be frying and seasoning fresh tortilla chips at Chipotle. The robots, with their articulated arms, multiple cameras and machine learning, excel at those mind-numbing tasks restaurant workers have to repeat again and again. And they aren’t sniffy about working the graveyard shift.
“We realized for a robotic solution to be a real solution for our customers, it had to have a really high customer return on investment. Which meant it had to take a meaningful amount of labor off the table,” Bell said.